the introduction to sundown towns

1

The Importance of Sundown Towns

“Is it true that ‘Anna’ stands for ‘Ain’t No Niggers Allowed’?” I asked at the con-venience store in Anna, Illinois, where I had stopped to buy coffee.

“Yes,” the clerk replied. “That’s sad, isn’t it,” she added, distancing her-self from the policy. And she went on to assure me, “That all happened a longtime ago.”

“I understand [racial exclusion] is still going on?” I asked.“Yes,” she replied. “That’s sad.”

—conversation with clerk, Anna, Illinois, October 2001

ANNA IS A TOWN of about 7,000 people, including adjoining Jonesboro.The twin towns lie about 35 miles north of Cairo, in southern Illinois. In1909, in the aftermath of a horrific nearby “spectacle lynching,” Anna andJonesboro expelled their African Americans. Both cities have been all-whiteever since.1 Nearly a century later, “Anna” is still considered by its residentsand by citizens of nearby towns to mean “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” theacronym the convenience store clerk confirmed in 2001.

It is common knowledge that African Americans are not allowed to live inAnna, except for residents of the state mental hospital and transients at its twomotels. African Americans who find themselves in Anna and Jonesboro afterdark—the majority-black basketball team from Cairo, for example—havesometimes been treated badly by residents of the towns, and by fans and stu-dents of Anna-Jonesboro High School. Towns such as Anna and Jonesboroare often called “sundown towns,” owing to the signs that many of them for-merly sported at their corporate limits—signs that usually said “Nigger, Don’tLet the Sun Go Down on You in __.” Anna-Jonesboro had such signs onHighway 127 as recently as the 1970s. These communities were also knownas “sunset towns” or, in the Ozarks, “gray towns.” In the East, although manycommunities excluded African Americans, the term “sundown town” itself

was rarely used. Residents of all-white suburbs also usually avoided the term,though not the policy.

Sundown Towns Are Almost Everywhere

A sundown town is any organized jurisdiction that for decades kept AfricanAmericans or other groups from living in it and was thus “all-white” on pur-pose.2 There is a reason for the quotation marks around “all-white”: requiringtowns to be literally all-white in the census—no African Americans at all—isinappropriate, because many towns clearly and explicitly defined themselvesas sundown towns but allowed one black household as an exception.3 Thusan all-white town may include nonblack minorities and even a tiny number ofAfrican Americans.

It turns out that Anna and Jonesboro are not unique or even unusual. Be-ginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans estab-lished thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Manytowns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. (Portfo-lio 7 shows an example.) Other towns passed ordinances barring AfricanAmericans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property;still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and evenkilling those who violated the rule. Some sundown towns similarly kept outJews, Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, or other groups.

Independent sundown towns range from tiny hamlets such as De Land,Illinois (population 500), to substantial cities such as Appleton, Wisconsin(57,000 in 1970).4 Sometimes entire counties went sundown, usually whentheir county seat did. Independent sundown towns were soon joined by “sundown suburbs,” which could be even larger: Levittown, on Long Island,had 82,000 residents in 1970, while Livonia, Michigan, and Parma, Ohio,had more than 100,000. Warren, a suburb of Detroit, had a population of180,000 including just 28 minority families, most of whom lived on a U.S.Army facility.5

Outside the traditional South—states historically dominated by slavery,where sundown towns are rare—probably a majority of all incorporated placeskept out African Americans. If that sentence startles, please suspend disbeliefuntil Chapter 3, which will show that Illinois, for example, had 671 towns andcities with more than 1,000 people in 1970, of which 475—71%—were all-white in census after census.6 Chapter 3 will prove that almost all of these 475were sundown towns. There is reason to believe that more than half of alltowns in Oregon, Indiana, Ohio, the Cumberlands, the Ozarks, and diverse

4 sundown towns

other areas were also all-white on purpose. Sundown suburbs are found fromDarien, Connecticut, to La Jolla, California, and are even more prevalent; in-deed, most suburbs began life as sundown towns.

Sundown towns also range across the income spectrum. In 1990, the me-dian owner-occupied house in Tuxedo Park, perhaps the wealthiest suburb ofNew York City, was worth more than $500,000 (the highest category in thecensus). So was the median house in Kenilworth, the richest suburb of Chi-cago. The median house in Pierce City, in southwestern Missouri, on theother hand, was worth just $29,800 and in Zeigler, in southern Illinois, just$21,900. All four towns kept out African Americans for decades.

This History Has Been Hidden

Even though sundown towns were everywhere, almost no literature exists onthe topic.7 No book has ever been written about the making of all-white townsin America.8 Indeed, this story is so unknown as to deserve the term hidden.Most Americans have no idea such towns or counties exist, or they think suchthings happened mainly in the Deep South. Ironically, the traditional Southhas almost no sundown towns. Mississippi, for instance, has no more than 6,mostly mere hamlets, while Illinois has no fewer than 456, as Chapter 3 willshow.

Even book-length studies of individual sundown towns rarely mentiontheir exclusionary policies. Local historians omit the fact intentionally, know-ing that it would reflect badly on their communities if publicized abroad. Iread at least 300 local histories—some of them elaborate coffee-table books—about towns whose sundown histories I had confirmed via detailed oral histo-ries, but only about 1 percent of these mentioned their town’s racial policies.In conversation, however, the authors of these commemorative histories wereoften more forthcoming, showing that they knew about the policy but didn’tcare to disclose it in print.

Social scientists and professional historians often have done no better intheir books. During the Depression, for instance, Malcolm Brown and JohnWebb wrote Seven Stranded Coal Towns, a report for the federal governmentabout towns in southern Illinois. All seven were sundown towns—most stillare—yet the authors never mention that fact. In 1986, anthropologist JohnCoggeshall wrote about thirteen southern Illinois communities; most wereprobably sundown towns when he wrote; I have confirmed at least five. Yet henever mentions the topic. In Toward New Towns for America, C. S. Stein treatsRadburn, New Jersey; “the Greens”—Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washing-

the importance of sundown towns 5

ton, DC; Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin,southwest of Milwaukee—planned towns built by the FDR administration;and several other planned communities, all sundown towns, without evermentioning race. This takes some doing; about Radburn, for example, Steindetails the first residents’ occupations, religious denominational member-ships, educational backgrounds, and incomes, without once mentioning thatall of them were white—and were required to be. Lewis Atherton’s MainStreet on the Middle Border treats small towns across the Midwest but makesno mention of sundown towns or indeed of African Americans or race rela-tions in any context.9

Historians and sociologists may have omitted the fact because they sim-ply did not know about sundown towns. For example, several historians as-sured me that no town in Wisconsin ever kept out or drove out AfricanAmericans. James Danky, librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, whosebook on the black press in America is the standard reference, wrote:

I have checked with three of my most knowledgeable colleagues and there isconsensus, we do not know of any such towns in Wisconsin. Clearly the BadgerState has a full supply of racism, just no such towns or counties. I believe youhave found such entities elsewhere, it is just that I think that it is a small category,at least in terms of being formally established.

Later, Danky was surprised and intrigued to learn I had confirmed 9 sun-down towns in Wisconsin and 194—no “small category”—in neighboringIllinois. Across the northern United States, many social scientists and histori-ans have gone slack-jawed when hearing details of community-wide exclusionfrom towns and counties in their state, lasting at least into the late twentiethcentury.10

Overlooking sundown towns stands in sharp contrast to the attention be-stowed upon that other violent and extralegal race relations practice: lynch-ing. The literature on lynching is vast, encompassing at least 500 and perhapsthousands of volumes; at this point we have at least one book for every tenconfirmed lynchings. Still the books keep coming; Amazon.com listed 209for sale in 2005. Yet lynchings have ceased in America.11 Sundown towns, onthe other hand, continue to this day.

Sundown towns arose during a crucial era of American history,1890–1940, when, after the gains of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras,race relations systematically grew worse. Since the 1955 publication of

6 sundown towns

C. Vann Woodward’s famous book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, histori-ans of the South have recognized that segregation became much stricter after1890. No longer could African Americans vote; no longer could they use therestaurants and public parks that whites used; even streetcars and railroadwaiting rooms now put up screens or signs to isolate blacks in separate sec-tions. African Americans were also beset by violence, as lynchings rose totheir highest point.12 However, most Americans have no idea that race rela-tions worsened between 1890 and the 1930s. As Edwin Yoder Jr. wrote in2003 in the Washington Post, “Notwithstanding the brilliant revisionist worksof the late C. Vann Woodward, few Americans even remotely grasp the earth-quake of 1890–1901 that overthrew biracial voting in the South.13

This backlash against African Americans was not limited to the South butwas national. Neither the public nor most historians realize that the sameearthquake struck the North, too. Woodward actually did; he wrote in thepreface to the second edition of his classic that the only reason he did not treatthe worsening of race relations in the North was because “my own compe-tence does not extend that far.” Unfortunately, except for a handful of impor-tant monographs on individual states and locales, few historians have tried tofill the gap in the half century since.14 Thus they missed one of the most ap-palling and widespread racial practices of them all: sundown towns. WhileAfrican Americans never lost the right to vote in the North (although therewere gestures in that direction), they did lose the right to live in town aftertown, county after county.15

My Own Ignorance

Initially, I too thought sundown towns, being so extreme, must be extremelyrare. Having learned of perhaps a dozen sundown towns and counties—Annaand Edina; Cicero and Berwyn, suburbs of Chicago; Darien, Connecticut, asuburb of New York City; Cedar Key, Florida; Forsyth County, Georgia; Albaand Vidor, Texas; and two or three others—I imagined there might be 50 suchtowns in the United States. I thought a book about them would be easy to re-search and write. I was wrong.

I began my on-site research in Illinois, for the simple reason that I grew upthere, in Decatur, in the center of the state. Coming of age in central Illinois,however, I never asked why the little towns clustered about my home city hadno black residents. After all, I reasoned, some communities are not on majorhighways, rivers, or rail lines; are not near African American population con-


centrations; and have not offered much in the way of employment. Probablythey never attracted African American residents. I had no idea that almost allall-white towns and counties in Illinois were all-white on purpose.

The idea that intentional sundown towns were everywhere in America, orat least everywhere in the Midwest, hit me between the eyes two years into thisresearch—on October 12, 2001. That evening I was the headliner at the De-catur Writers Conference. It was an interesting homecoming, because at theend of my address, I mentioned my ongoing research on sundown towns andinvited those who knew something about the subject to come forward and talkwith me. In response, a throng of people streamed to the front to tell me aboutsundown towns they knew of in central Illinois. Moweaqua (2000 population1,923, 0 African Americans) was all-white on purpose, two people said.Nearby Assumption (1,261, 0 African Americans) was also a sundown town,except for its orphanage, Kemmerer Village, and the few African Americanchildren there often had a hard time in the Assumption school because oftheir color. An Illinoisian who “grew up on a farm just west of Decatur and at-tended high school in Niantic,” a hamlet just west of Decatur (738, 0 AfricanAmericans), wrote later, “I had always heard that it was against the law forblacks to stay in Niantic overnight. Supposedly, when the railroad sectioncrew was in the area, they would have to pull the work train, with its sleepingquarters for the section hands, out on the main track for the night.” Anotherperson confirmed the railroad story, and two others agreed separately that Ni-antic kept out black people, so I had to conclude that Niantic’s populationwas all-white not because it was so small, but because African Americans werenot permitted. Still others came down with information about De Land,Maroa, Mt. Zion, Pana, Villa Grove, and a dozen other nearby towns.

That evening in Decatur revolutionized my thinking. I now perceivedthat in the normal course of human events, most and perhaps all towns wouldnot be all-white. Racial exclusion was required. “If they did not have such apolicy,” observed an African American resident of Du Quoin, Illinois, aboutthe all-white towns around Du Quoin, “surely blacks would be in them.” Icame to understand that he was right. “If people of color aren’t around,”writes commentator Tim Wise, “there’s a reason, having something to dowith history, and exclusion. . . .” 16

Though mind-boggling to me, this insight proved hardly new. As early as1858, before the dispersal of African Americans throughout the Northprompted by the Civil War, the Wyandotte Herald in Wyandotte, in southeast-ern Michigan, stated, “Wyandotte is again without a single colored inhabitant,something remarkable for a city of over 6,000 people.” Even then, the Herald

8 sundown towns

understood that a city of over 6,000 people was “remarkable” for being all-white.We shall see that a series of riots and threats was required to keep Wyan-dotte white over the years.17

Later, after slavery ended, African Americans moved throughout Amer-ica, making it “remarkable” even for smaller towns to be all-white. The anony-mous author of History of Lower Scioto Valley, south of Columbus, Ohio,writing in 1884, recognized this in discussing Waverly, a sundown town sincebefore the Civil War:

In 1875 a local census showed Waverly to have 1,279 inhabitants. . . . It will beseen that the fact of Waverly’s not having a single colored resident is a rare markof distinction for a town of its size. And what makes the fact more remarkable,there never has been a Negro or mulatto resident of the place.18

Sundown Towns Are Recent

In 1884, it was “a rare mark of distinction” for a town the size of Waverly to beall-white. A few years later, however, beginning around 1890 and lasting untilat least 1968, towns throughout Ohio and most other states began to emulatethe racial policy of places like Wyandotte and Waverly. Most independentsundown towns expelled their black residents, or agreed not to admit any, be-tween 1890 and 1940. Sundown suburbs arose still later, between 1900 and1968. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was no longer rare for townsthe size of Waverly to be all-white. It was common, and usually it was on pur-pose.

So sundown towns are not only widespread,but also relatively recent.Ex-cept for a handful of places such as Wyandotte and Waverly, most towns didnot go sundown during slavery, before the Civil War, or during Reconstruc-tion. On the contrary, blacks moved everywhere in America between 1865and 1890. African Americans reached every county of Montana. More than400 lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. City neighborhoods across thecountry were fairly integrated, too, even if black inhabitants were often ser-vants or gardeners for their white neighbors.

Between 1890 and the 1930s, however, all this changed. By 1930, al-though its white population had increased by 75%, the Upper Peninsula washome to only 331 African Americans, and 180 of them were inmates of theMarquette State Prison. Eleven Montana counties had no blacks at all. Acrossthe country, city neighborhoods grew more and more segregated. Most aston-ishing, from California to Minnesota to Long Island to Florida, whites


mounted little race riots against African Americans, expelling entire blackcommunities or intimidating and keeping out would-be newcomers.

The Role of Violence

Whenever a town had African American residents and no longer does, weshould seek to learn how and why they left. Expulsions and prohibitions oftenlurk behind the census statistics. Vienna, a town in southern Illinois, providesa rather recent example. In 1950, Vienna had 1,085 people, including a blackcommunity of long standing, dating to the Civil War. In the 1950 census,African Americans numbered 34; additional black families lived just outsideVienna’s city limits. Then in the summer of 1954, two black men beat up awhite grandmother and allegedly tried to rape her teenage granddaughter.The grandmother eventually died, and “every [white] man in town was depu-tized” to find the culprits, according to a Vienna resident in 2004. The twomen were apprehended; in the aftermath, whites sacked the entire black com-munity. “They burned the houses,” my informant said. “The blacks literallyran for their lives.” The Vienna Times put it more sedately: “The three re-maining buildings on the South hill in the south city limits of Vienna were de-stroyed by fire about 4:30 o’clock Monday afternoon.” The report went on totell that the state’s attorney and circuit judge later addressed a joint meeting ofthe Vienna city council and Johnson County commissioners, “telling them ofthe loss sustained by the colored people.” Both bodies “passed a resolutioncondemning the acts of vandalism” and promised to pay restitution to thosewho lost their homes and belongings. Neither body invited the black commu-nity to return, and no one was ever convicted of the crime of driving them out.In the 2000 census, Vienna’s population of 1,234 included just 1 AfricanAmerican.19

Violence also lay beneath the surface of towns that showed no sudden de-cline in black residents, never having had any. In 1951, for example, a Chicagobus driver, Harvey Clark, a veteran, tried to move into an apartment in subur-ban Cicero. First, the police stopped him by force, according to a report by so-cial scientist William Gremley:

As he arrived at the building with the moving van, local police officials, includ-ing the Cicero police chief, stopped him from entering. When he protested,they informed him he could not move in without a “permit.” Clark argued invain against this edict and finally telephoned his solicitor, who assured him that

10 sundown towns

there was no provision in local, state, or federal laws for any such “permit.” Thepolice officials then bluntly ordered him and the van away, threatening him witharrest if he failed to comply with their demand. Clark then left, after being man-handled and struck.

Two weeks later, with help from the NAACP, Clark got an injunction barringthe Cicero police from interfering with his moving in and ordering them “toafford him full protection from any attempt to so restrain him.” As he movedin, a month after his first attempt, whites stood across the street and shoutedracial epithets. That evening, a large crowd gathered, shouting and throwingstones to break the windows in the apartment Clark had just rented. Pru-dently, the Clark family did not occupy the apartment. The next night, themob attacked the building, looted the Clarks’ apartment as well as some adjoining flats, threw the Clarks’ furniture and other belongings out the win-dow, and set them afire in the courtyard below. Local police stood by andwatched.20

The following night, a mob of 3,500 gathered and rioted. According to asummary by Peter and Mort Bergman, “Gov. Adlai Stevenson called out theNational Guard, and 450 guardsmen and 200 Cicero and Cook County po-lice quelled the disorder; 72 persons were arrested, 60 were charged, 17 peo-ple were hospitalized.” Violence like this happened repeatedly in Cicero andadjacent Berwyn. In the 1960s, a white mob stoned members of the Congressof Racial Equality (CORE) marching through Cicero supporting open hous-ing. Whites in Cicero beat seventeen-year-old African American JeromeHuey to death in the summer of 1966. In 1987, Norbert Blei, a Cicero resi-dent, wrote Neighborhood, a warm memoir about the city. He told how anAfrican American family

“almost” moved into Cicero on West 12th Place last spring. But they didn’tmake it. The black family said that they didn’t know the home they bought wasin Cicero. They thought it was in Chicago. But Cicero reminded them with gas-filled bottles and shots in the dark. “The area is well-secured,” said Cicero’scouncil president, John Karner, after the incendiary incident.

So far as I know, no one was ever convicted in Cicero or Vienna.21

This is not ancient history. Many victims of Vienna’s ethnic cleansing arestill alive; some even return to Vienna from time to time to obtain birth certifi-cates or transact other business.22 The perpetrators and the victims of the


1987 Cicero incident still live. Moreover, African Americans who tried tomove into other sundown suburbs and towns have had trouble as recently as2004, as later chapters will tell.

Across America, at least 50 towns, and probably many more than that,drove out their African American populations violently. At least 16 did so inIllinois alone. In the West, another 50 or more towns drove out their ChineseAmerican populations.23 Many other sundown towns and suburbs used vio-lence to keep out blacks or, sometimes, other minorities.

Sundown Nation

Sundown towns are no minor matter. To this day, African Americans whoknow about sundown towns concoct various rules to predict and avoid them.In Florida, for instance, any town or city with “Palm” in its name was thoughtto be especially likely to keep out African Americans. In Indiana, it was any ju-risdiction with a color in its name, such as Brownsburg, Brownstown, BrownCounty, Greenfield, Greenwood, or Vermillion County—and indeed, all weresundown locales. Across the United States, African Americans are still under-standably wary of towns with “white” in their name, such as Whitesboro,Texas; White City, Kansas; White Hall, Arkansas; Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin;and Whiteland, Whitestown, and White County, Indiana—and again, all theforegoing communities probably kept out African Americans. So have a num-ber of towns named for idealistic concepts—Equality, Illinois; New Harmony,Indiana; Liberty, Tennessee, and the like. Actually, most places with “white”in their name were named after someone (or some fish) named “White”; thesesundry rules “work” only because most communities were sundown towns.

Millions of Americans—including many of our country’s leaders—live inor grew up in sundown towns and suburbs. An interesting way to see theubiquity of these towns is to examine the backgrounds of all northern candi-dates for president nominated by the two major parties since the twentiethcentury began and sundown towns became common.24 Of the 27 candidatesfor whom I could readily distinguish the racial policies of their hometowns,one-third were identified with sundown towns. Starting at the beginning ofthe century, these include Republican William McKinley, who grew up inNiles, Ohio, where “a sign near the Erie Depot,” according to historianWilliam Jenkins, “warned ‘niggers’ that they had better not ‘let the sun set ontheir heads.’ ” McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan, whogrew up in Salem, Illinois, which for decades “had signs on each main roadgoing into town, telling the blacks, that they were not allowed in town after

12 sundown towns

sundown,” according to Ed Hayes, who graduated from Salem High Schoolin 1969. Teddy Roosevelt was most identified with Cove Neck, a tiny upper-class peninsula on Long Island that incorporated partly to keep out undesir-ables, including African Americans, requiring large building lots. As late as1990, its small black population consisted overwhelmingly of live-in maids. In1920, Warren G. Harding ran his famous “front porch campaign” from hisfamily home in Marion, Ohio; a few months before, Marion was the scene ofan ethnic cleansing as whites drove out virtually every African American. Ac-cording to Harding scholar Phillip Payne, “As a consequence, Marion is anoverwhelming[ly] white town to this date [2002].” Herbert Hoover grew upin a part of Iowa that may have gotten rid of its blacks around that time, but Icannot confirm his hometown as a sundown town.25 Wendell Willkie’s fatherwas mayor of Elwood, Indiana, a sundown town that is still all-white today;Willkie went to Elwood in 1940 to deliver his speech accepting the Republi-can nomination. Owosso, Michigan, briefly became mildly notorious as a sun-down town in 1944 and 1948 because Thomas Dewey, Republican candidatefor president, grew up there. But Democrats couldn’t make too much of thatfact, especially in 1948, because their own candidate, Harry Truman, alsogrew up in a sundown town, Lamar, Missouri. Reporter Morris Milgrampointed out that Lamar “was a Jim Crow town of 3,000, without a singleNegro family. When I had spoken about this with leading citizens of Lamar. . . they told me, all using the word ‘n——r,’ that colored people weren’twanted in Lamar.” Another Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, grew up in JohnsonCity, Texas, probably a sundown town.26 The trend continues to the present:George W. Bush lived for years in Highland Park, a sundown suburb of Dal-las; so did his vice president, Dick Cheney, from 1995 until he moved toWashington to take office.27 The first African American to buy a home inHighland Park did so only in June 2003. In all, nine of America’s presidentialcandidates since 1900 grew up in probable sundown towns and suburbs,eighteen came from towns where blacks could live, and five from towns28

whose policies I haven’t been able to identify.29

Besides presidents, such famous Americans as public speaker DaleCarnegie (Maryville, Missouri), folksinger Woody Guthrie (Okemah, Okla-homa), Senator Joe McCarthy (Appleton, Wisconsin), etiquette czar EmilyPost (Tuxedo Park, New York), and architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Oak Park,Illinois) grew up in towns that kept out African Americans. So did novelistsErnest Hemingway (Oak Park), Edna Ferber (Appleton), and James Jones(Robinson, Illinois), although as far as I can tell, they never mentioned thematter in their writing. I do not know if apple pie was invented in a sundown


town, but Spam (Austin, Minnesota), Kentucky Fried Chicken (Corbin, Ken-tucky), and Heath Bars (Robinson) were. Other signature American ediblessuch as Krispy Kreme doughnuts (Effingham, Illinois30) and Tootsie Rolls(West Lawn, Chicago) also come from sundown communities. Tarzan mayhave lived in “darkest Africa,” but he was born in one sundown town (OakPark, home of Edgar Rice Burroughs), and the proceeds from his wildly suc-cessful novels and movies underwrote Burroughs’s creation of another(Tarzana, California).31 The highest-grossing movie of all time (in constantdollars), Gone with the Wind, was made in a sundown town, Culver City, Cal-ifornia, from which vantage point producer David Selznick was baffled by petitions from African Americans concerned about the racism in its screen-play.32 Gentleman’s Agreement, on the other hand, the only feature film to treatsundown towns seriously, was made in Los Angeles.33

Chapter 3, “The Great Retreat,” will show that large cities like Los Ange-les could not exclude blacks completely—the task was simply too daunting—although residents of New York City, Fort Wayne, Tulsa, and several othercities tried. Nevertheless, whole sections of cities did keep out African Ameri-cans and sometimes other groups. Although this book doesn’t usually treat“mere” neighborhoods, some sundown neighborhoods are huge. West Lawnin Chicago, for instance, has its own Chamber of Commerce, whose executivedirector brags that it is “a small town in a big city.” It is also the birthplace ofthe Dove ice cream bar and the Tucker automobile. According to reporterSteve Bogira, in 1980 West Lawn had 113,000 whites and just 111 AfricanAmericans. Every large city in the United States has its all-white neighbor-hoods, all-white by design; certainly the West End of Decatur, where I grewup, was that way. All too many small towns, meanwhile, if they are interracial atall, still consist of sundown neighborhoods on one side, overwhelminglyblack neighborhoods on the other, and the business district or a railroad in between. So sundown neighborhoods form another major part of the problem.34

Why Dwell On It Now?

Since 1969, I have been studying how Americans remember their past, espe-cially their racial past. Sometimes audiences or readers ask, “Why do you in-sist on dredging up the abominations in our past?” About sundown towns inparticular, some people have suggested that we might all be happier and betteroff not knowing about them. “Why focus on that?” asked an old AfricanAmerican man in Colp, in southern Illinois, in 2001, when he learned I was

14 sundown towns

studying the sundown towns that surrounded Colp in every direction.“That’s done with.” 35

I thought about his suggestion seriously. After all, during the 1980s and1990s, many communities relaxed their prohibitions and accepted at leastone or two black families, sometimes many more. But I concluded there wereseveral reasons why the sad story of sundown towns should not be kept out ofview.

First—and most basically—it happened. Our country did do that. Surelythe fact that since about 1890, thousands of towns across the United Stateskept out African Americans, while others excluded Jewish, Chinese, Japa-nese, Native, or Mexican Americans, is worth knowing. So is the panoply ofmethods whites employed to accomplish this end. I hope this book promptsreaders to question all-white communities everywhere, rather than take themfor granted. Whenever the census shows that a town or county has been all-white or overwhelmingly white for decades, we do well to investigate further,since across the nation, most all-white towns were that way intentionally.Telling the truth about them is the right thing to do.

It is also true that the powers that be don’t want us to learn about theirpolicy of exclusion and have sometimes tried to suppress the knowledge. Thetruth about sundown towns implicates the powers that be. The role played bygovernments regarding race relations can hardly be characterized as benign oreven race-neutral. From the towns that passed sundown ordinances, to thecounty sheriffs who escorted black would-be residents back across the countyline, to the states that passed laws enabling municipalities to zone out “unde-sirables,” to the federal government—whose lending and insuring policiesfrom the 1930s to the 1960s required sundown neighborhoods and sub-urbs—our governments openly favored white supremacy and helped to createand maintain all-white communities. So did most of our banks, realtors, andpolice chiefs. If public relations offices, Chambers of Commerce, and localhistorical societies don’t want us to know something, perhaps that somethingis worth learning. After all, how can we deal with something if we cannot evenface it?

There are other reasons to incorporate sundown towns into our accountsof our nation’s past. “I am anxious for this book,” a high school historyteacher in Pennsylvania wrote.

I tend to collect evidence for my students that racism and discrimination stillexist. Many like to pass it off as a part of the distant (before they were born) past,thus no further energy or thought need be expended on the issue!


Chronicling the sundown town movement teaches us that something signifi-cant has been left out of the broad history of race in America as it is usuallytaught. It opens a door into an entire era that America has kept locked away ina closet. I hope that Sundown Towns will transform Americans’ understandingof race relations in the North during the first two-thirds of the twentieth cen-tury. Realizing that blatant racial exclusion increased during the first half ofthe twentieth century and in many places continues into the twenty-first canhelp mobilize Americans today to expend energy to end these practices.36

Many people wonder why African Americans have made so littleprogress, given that 140 years have passed since slavery ended. They do notunderstand that in some ways, African Americans lived in better and more in-tegrated conditions in the 1870s and 1880s, that residential segregation thengrew worse until about 1968, and that it did not start to decrease again untilthe 1970s and 1980s, well after the Civil Rights Movement ended. Recover-ing the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during thefirst half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the roleracism has played in our society and continues to play today.

Sundown Towns Persist

In other spheres of race relations, America has made great strides. The atten-tion given to southern segregation—not just by historians but, more impor-tantly, by the Civil Rights Movement and the courts, beginning in1954—ended its more appalling practices. Whites, blacks, and other racesride the same subways, buses, trains, and planes. Americans of all back-grounds work together in offices, restaurants, factories, and the military. Uni-versities, north and south, now enroll African American undergraduates;some even compete for them. Republican as well as Democratic administra-tions include African Americans in important positions as a matter of course.We have made far less progress, however, regarding where we live. Aided by neglect, the number of sundown towns and suburbs continued to growafter 1954, peaking around 1968. Many sundown towns had not a singleblack household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude tothis day.

Many whites still feel threatened at the prospect of African Americanneighbors—maybe not just one, but of any appreciable number. Residentialsegregation persists at high levels. “What is more,” wrote Stephen Meyer inhis 2000 book, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door, “many Americans ofboth races have come to accept racial separation as appropriate.” Indeed,

16 sundown towns

many whites see residential segregation as desirable. Across America, suchelite sundown suburbs37 as Darien, Connecticut; Naperville, Illinois; andEdina, Minnesota, are sought-after addresses, partly owing to, rather than de-spite, their racial makeup.38

Therefore this book has important implications for current racial poli-cies. Most attempts to understand or ameliorate America’s astounding resi-dential concentrations of African Americans and Latinos have focused on theghetto, barrio, or “changing neighborhood.” We shall see, however, that theseproblem areas result primarily from exclusion elsewhere in the social sys-tem—from sundown towns and suburbs. But despite their causal importance,these white “ghettoes” have been dramatically underresearched. As a result,few Americans realize that metropolitan areas are not “naturally” segregatedand that suburban whiteness has been produced by unsavory policies thatcontinue in part to this day. If Americans understood the origins of over-whelmingly white communities, they might see that such neighborhoods arenothing to be proud of.

On the contrary, all this residential exclusion is bad for our nation. In fact,residential segregation is one reason race continues to be such a problem inAmerica. But race really isn’t the problem. Exclusion is the problem. Theghetto—with all its pathologies—isn’t the problem; the elite sundown sub-urb—seemingly devoid of social difficulties—is the problem. As soon as werealize that the problem in America is white supremacy, rather than black ex-istence or black inferiority, then it becomes clear that sundown towns andsuburbs are an intensification of the problem, not a solution to it. So long asracial inequality is encoded in the most basic single fact in our society—whereone can live—the United States will face continuing racial tension, if not overtconflict.

Thus the continued existence of overwhelmingly white communities isterribly important. Moreover, residential segregation exacerbates all otherforms of racial discrimination. Segregated neighborhoods make it easier todiscriminate against African Americans in schooling, housing, and city ser-vices, for instance. We shall see that residential segregation also causes em-ployment inequalities by isolating African Americans from the socialnetworks where job openings are discussed. Thus some of the inadequaciesfor which white Americans blame black Americans are products of, ratherthan excuses for, residential segregation.

All-white communities also make it easier for their residents to thinkbadly of nonwhites. Because so many whites live in sundown neighborhoods,their stereotypes about how African Americans live remain intact, unchal-


lenged by contact with actual black families living day-to-day lives. In fact,these stereotypes get intensified because they help rationalize living in sun-down neighborhoods in the first place. Black stereotypes about whites also gounchallenged by experience. Trying to teach second-graders not to be preju-diced is an uphill battle in an all-white primary school in a culture that valuesall-white communities. Among adults, living in overwhelmingly white neigh-borhoods and suburbs ties in with opposing policies that might decrease thesharp differences between the life chances of blacks and whites in our society.

The Plan of the Book

This book is divided into six parts. Part I, “Introduction,” consists of thischapter, “The Importance of Sundown Towns,” and Chapter 2, “The Nadir:Incubator of Sundown Towns.” Chapter 2 begins with the “springtime of racerelations” following the Civil War, when blacks moved everywhere in Amer-ica. Then it tells of the time when race relations actually moved backward—the era that not only gave rise to sundown towns, but made them seemnecessary, at least to some white Americans. Today’s overwhelmingly whitetowns, suburbs, and neighborhoods linger as living legacies from that tragicperiod when race relations grew harsher.

Part II, “The History of Sundown Towns,” includes three chapters.Chapter 3, “The Great Retreat,” suggests a term for the massive strategicwithdrawal that African Americans—and Chinese Americans before them—were forced to make from northern and western towns and rural areas to ourlarge cities. Until now, historians have largely overlooked the forced departureof minorities, the Nadir period in the North that gave rise to the Great Retreat,and the “springtime of race relations” in the North that preceded the Nadir.“The Great Retreat” also shows statistically how widespread the sundowntown movement was. Chapter 4, “How Sundown Towns Were Created,” ex-plains the mechanisms underlying these statistics. It supplies examples of theuse of violence, threats, law, and official policy; informal means such as freeze-outs and buyouts; and suburban methods including zoning and public plan-ning, all in the service of creating all-white communities. Chapter 5,“Sundown Suburbs,” notes that the rush to the suburbs wasn’t originallyracial but became racially tagged after about 1900. Sundown suburbs thengrew even more widespread than independent sundown towns and persistedin forming into the late 1960s. By the time the federal government finallyswitched sides and tried to undo the resulting segregation, great damage hadbeen done to our metropolitan areas.

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Part III, “The Sociology of Sundown Towns,” also contains three chap-ters. Often a sundown town is located near an interracial town. What explainswhy the first went sundown while the second did not? What explains Anna-Jonesboro, for example, when five miles north, Cobden, Illinois, always al-lowed African Americans to live in it? Chapter 6, “Underlying Causes,”suggests several basic conditions that underlie and predict sundown towns;unaware of these factors, many residents believe nonsensical or tautological“reasons.” Chapter 7, “Catalysts and Origin Myths,” deconstructs the trigger-ing incidents that residents often invoke to justify their town’s policy andshows how these stories function as origin myths.Chapter 8,“Hidden in PlainView: Knowing and Not Knowing About Sundown Towns,” tells why mostAmericans have no idea that sundown towns exist.This chapter also sets forththe methods and evidence underlying the claims made throughout the book.Some readers suggested relegating this material to an appendix,but I need youto read the book actively, assessing my claims as you go along. I invite skeptics(which I hope includes all readers) to turn to this chapter at any point,and alsoto the “Portfolio” in the center of the book—photographs and newspaperheadlines that introduce visually some of the evidence for these claims.

The two chapters of Part IV, “Sundown Towns in Operation,” explainhow, once they made their decision to go all-white, sundown communitiesmanaged to stay so white for so long. Chapter 9, “Enforcement,” tells thesometimes heartbreaking consequences inflicted upon casual and even inad-vertent visitors caught after dark in sundown towns, and the still worse reper-cussions that awaited persons of color who tried to move in permanently.Chapter 10, “Exceptions to the Sundown Rule,” explains that many all-whitetowns allowed an exceptional African American or Chinese American or twoto stay, even as they defined their communities as sundown towns. Usuallythese exceptions reinforced the sundown rule by making it all the more obvi-ous.

Part V, “Effects of Sundown Towns” answers the question, what differ-ence do these towns make? Its three chapters show that they have bad effects“On Whites” (Chapter 11), “On Blacks” (Chapter 12), and “On the SocialSystem” (Chapter 13). The resulting pattern of “chocolate cites and vanillasuburbs” has damaged everything from Republican Party platforms to blackemployability and morale.

Part VI, “The Present and Future of Sundown Towns,” contains twochapters. Chapter 14, “Sundown Towns Today,” tells that many communitiesrelaxed their prohibitions since about 1980, while others did not. This recentimprovement has made choosing the appropriate verb tense difficult. Putting


a practice in the past—“Fans in many sundown towns seemed affronted thatAfrican Americans dared to play in their town”—would mislead, because fansin many sundown towns continue to taunt visiting interracial athletic teams.At the same time, writing “such elite sundown suburbs as Darien, Connecti-cut” might imply that Darien still keeps blacks out today—which I don’t knowand even doubt. I resolved my verb tense dilemma as best I could, usuallyusing the continuing past (“has excluded”) or the present tense (“keeps out”)if a town kept out African Americans (or other groups) for decades, regardlessof whether it does so now.39 Such statements do not necessarily mean that thetown is sundown to this day. Please do not assume that a town still keeps outAfrican Americans without checking it out yourself. Meanwhile, concurrentwith this improvement, Americans have also been developing new forms ofexclusion, based no longer on race—at least not explicitly—but on differencesin social class that then get reified on the landscape in the form of gated com-munities.

The final chapter is titled “The Remedy: Integrated Neighborhoods andTowns.” It suggests tactics for everyone from members of Congress to indi-vidual homeowners who want to end sundown towns—surely a national dis-grace.

The Penultimate Denial of Human Rights

How could America do these things? How could white Americans drive Chi-nese Americans and African Americans and sometimes other groups fromhundreds of towns? How could thousands of other towns and suburbs flatlyprevent African Americans, Jewish Americans, or others from living in them?After all, after life itself, allowing someone to live in a place is perhaps the mostbasic human right of all. If people cannot live in a town, they cannot attendschool in it, vote, or participate in any other form of civic life or human inter-action.

In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, that most racist of all Supreme Court de-crees, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney held that African Americans “had formore than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, andaltogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political re-lations, and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man wasbound to respect.” Between 1890 and the 1930s—and continuing to the pres-ent in some places—many white Americans actually tried to put his wordsinto practice, in the form of sundown towns and suburbs. “After all,” they rea-soned, “if the founding fathers and their successors, including Taney, thought

20 sundown towns

African Americans were ‘altogether unfit to associate with the white race,’then let’s stop associating with them. And let’s do this, not by altering our be-havior, but by limiting their choices—by excluding them.”

Of course, other countries have flatly denied the rights of an entire race of people to live in a town or wider area. In Germany, beginning in 1934,according to historian James Pool, local Nazis began to put up signs “out-side many German towns and villages: JEWS NOT WANTED HERE.” Poolgoes on:

Before long the signs outside some towns were worded in more threateningterms: JEWS ENTER THIS TOWN AT YOUR OWN RISK. At this point theNazi government in Berlin reluctantly intervened. . . . Although Berlin orderedall threatening signs removed, most of them stayed up.

Two years later, most German sundown signs actually came down at Berlin’sinsistence as Germany prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games. During thisperiod, hundreds and perhaps thousands of towns in America already dis-played signs like the ones the Germans were putting up, directed againstAfrican Americans, but our government in Washington never ordered any ofthem removed, not even those on California highways as America preparedfor the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. To be sure, beginning in 1938,Germany’s “Final Solution” made communities free of Jews in a much morevicious way than anything the United States ever achieved. Still, it is soberingto realize that many jurisdictions in America had accomplished by 1934–36what Nazis in those years could only envy.40

Residential Segregation Lives On

Germany reversed course in 1945. The Allies forced it to. The sundown townmovement in the United States did not begin to slow until 1968, however,even cresting in about 1970, and we cannot yet consign sundown towns to thepast. More than half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in Brownv. Board of Education that whites cannot keep blacks out of white schools, andmore than forty years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to keepthem out of a restaurant, hundreds of towns and suburbs still keep AfricanAmericans out of entire municipalities.

Several towns near Colp, Illinois, for example, are not done with beingsundown towns. Consider the town with which we began this chapter, Anna,some 30 miles southwest. In September 2002, to the best knowledge of


Anna’s reference librarian and newspaper editor, neither Anna nor its com-panion city of Jonesboro had a single African American household withintheir corporate limits. In 2004, a rural resident of the Anna-Jonesboro SchoolDistrict confirmed, “Oh no, there are no black people in Anna today.” Dothese towns still actively keep out African Americans, or is their all-white na-ture merely the result of inertia and reputation? At the very least, Anna andJonesboro—like most other sundown towns—have taken no public steps toannounce any change in policy.41

Anna is only an example, of course. Hundreds of other towns and sub-urbs across the United States have kept out African Americans even longerthan Anna and are equally white today. Unfortunately for our country, Amer-ica has not reached the point where all-white towns and suburbs are seen asanachronisms. Indeed, in a way, sundown towns are still being created. Whitefamilies are still moving to overwhelmingly if not formally all-white exurbsdistant from inner suburbs that have now gone interracial. And Americans ofall races are moving to gated communities, segregated on income lines andsometimes informally segregated on racial grounds as well.

Not only our sundown past but also our sundown present affronts me. Ibelieve that Americans who understand that all-white towns still exist—partlyowing to past government actions and inactions—will share my anger and willsupport government and private actions in the opposite direction, to openthem to everyone. I hope also that lifting the veil of secrecy that conceals theovert and often violent cleansings that produced sundown towns and suburbswill prompt Americans to see these “racially pure” communities as places tobe avoided rather than desired.

Where we live does affect how we think, and eliminating all-white townsand neighborhoods will decrease racial prejudice and misunderstanding. So-cial psychologists have long found that a good way to reduce prejudice is fordifferent people to live together and interact on an equal footing. We will see in“The Remedy” that racial integration usually does work. It helps to humanizemost individuals who live in interracial communities, and the existence ofsuch communities helps to humanize our culture as a whole. As sociologistRobert Park wrote decades ago, “Most if not all cultural changes in societywill be correlated with changes in territorial organization, and every change inthe territorial and occupational distribution of the population will effectchanges in the existing culture.” So if we want American culture to be non-racist, Park would tell us, we have to eradicate our racially exclusive commu-nities.42

“The Remedy” will challenge you to do something about the history it

22 sundown towns

presents. I am optimistic: at last, many people seem ready to talk about sun-down towns, ready even to change them. Americans have come to decry overtracism, after all, and the task could hardly be more important. Indeed, inte-grating sundown towns and suburbs becomes, ultimately, a battle for ournation’s soul, and for its future.

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United Statesbetween about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in theirwake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, wouldopenly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns andsuburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

At this point you may be shocked: how could it happen that in 1909whites in Anna, Illinois, might run every African American resident out oftheir community, never to return? That many other towns across the UnitedStates could take similar actions as late as 1954? That Hawthorne, California,had a sign at its city limits in the 1930s that said, “Nigger, Don’t Let The SunSet On YOU In Hawthorne”? Or that Minden and Gardnerville, Nevada,sounded a whistle at 6 PM to tell all American Indians to get out of town beforesundown?43

To understand how so many sundown towns formed in the UnitedStates, we must examine the era—1890 to 1940—that gave rise to them.


the introduction to sundown towns

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